You are assessing whether a patient's emotional response is an abnormal emotional reaction. Before revealing the answer, decide how you would assess for this.

Ask the patient to describe the emotion itself, confirming it is a recognisable, ordinary human feeling, such as fear, sadness, or anger, rather than something bizarre or alien. Assess its intensity, duration, and persistence against what the triggering event would reasonably be expected to produce, since being out of proportion to the triggering event is the central feature. Confirm the patient can usually still identify the real event or situation that set the reaction off, since this connection to an identifiable trigger is what distinguishes it from more severe, less clearly reactive disturbances. Consider where the presentation sits on the broader spectrum of disordered emotion, since this sits at the mild end of a spectrum, distinguished from more severe morbid disorders of emotion mainly by degree.