A patient describes, with full clarity and coherent understanding of her circumstances, a persistent and distressing feeling that something terrible is about to happen to her family, though she cannot say what or why, and she otherwise makes complete sense of her surroundings. Before revealing the answer: is this perplexity?

No, this is more consistent with anxious foreboding than with perplexity. There is no bewilderment or difficulty making sense of her experience or surroundings here — she understands her circumstances with full clarity. Instead, the core feature is a sense of impending misfortune, a feeling that something bad is about to happen, which is the defining quality of anxious foreboding rather than the confused, puzzled inability to make sense of experience that defines perplexity.