Existence of any nonlinearity in responses of a nonlinear system is tested using a kurtosis or a fourth moment which has been widely used to characterize signal patterns. By inputting a harmonic signal to a system and investigating the distortions of an output signal from a harmonic pattern, which are due to violations of proportionality between the input and the output, it is judged whether the output is generated from a nonlinear system or not. Through applying the method presented in this work to simulation studies on detections of nonlinearities of a single degree of freedom system, in which three kinds of nonlinearities are treated as restoring force terms, feasibilities of the method are shown and the range of both frequency and input amplitude, in which the system generates nonlinear responses, is determined.