A patient describes a serious road traffic accident she was involved in, in a calm, matter-of-fact tone with no visible distress, while her emotional responses to other, unrelated topics discussed in the same interview remain entirely normal and appropriately expressed. What is this?

This is dissociation of affect: a separation between an emotionally significant event and the feeling that would normally accompany it, here described in a curiously detached, matter-of-fact way despite the traumatic content, with emotional responses to other topics remaining normal, exactly as described. It is not blunting of affect, since dissociation of affect differs from affect blunting, a morbid expression of emotion in which the capacity for emotional response is generally reduced across the board, rather than selectively separated from particular content — here the reduced feeling is confined to this one topic, with normal emotional expression elsewhere. It is not denial, in which the person actively minimises or refuses to acknowledge the difficulty of the situation, rather than describing it accurately but without matching feeling, as she does here. And it is not depersonalisation, which involves detachment from one's own sense of self more broadly, not from a specific emotionally charged memory.