A term used in the 1974 Present State Examination (PSE) schedule, developed by the British psychiatrists John Kenneth Wing et al., to denote a hallucinated noise other than a recognizable word or sentence. Some examples ofnonverbal hallucinations featuring in the PSE are music, tapping, central heating noises, whispering, muttering, and mumbling. According to Wing et al. the term nonverbal hallucination should not be applied in cases with an explicable origin in bodily processes, such as * tinnitus. The term nonverbal hallucination is used in opposition to the term *verbal hallucination.
References
Wing, J.K., Cooper, J.E., Sartorius, N. (1974). The measurement and classification of psychiatric symptoms. An instruction manual for the PSE and Catego program. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dictionary of Hallucinations. J.D. Blom. 2010.