In one aspect, the present invention improves Turbo equalization and/or soft interference cancellation processing in communication receivers by providing an efficient and accurate technique to compute the second moment of a received symbol, e.g., an interfering symbol, as a function of the expected bit values of only those bits in the symbol that are magnitude-controlling bits according to a defined modulation constellation. Advantageously, the expected bit values in at least one embodiment are computed using a LUT that maps bit LLRs to corresponding hyperbolic tangent function values. Further, the expected symbol value is computed as a linear function of terms comprising the expected bit values and the soft symbol variance is efficiently computed from the second moment and the expected symbol value squared. This simplified processing reduces receiver complexity, particularly in the context of modulation constellations having non-constant magnitudes, and thus saves power and/or improves design economics.