A term featuring in the 1974 Present State Examination (PSE) schedule, developed by the British psychiatrists John Kenneth Wing et al. As defined in the PSE, the notion of non-affective verbal hallucination may refer to two distinct types of *verbal auditory hallucination, one of which is characterized by one or more recognizable voices speaking about the subject and the other being characterized by one or more recognizable voices speaking to the subject. In both cases, the words or sentences uttered must be larger in number than two. Within the classification of the PSE schedule, the non-affective verbal hallucination is considered a variant of the * verbal hallucination. The term is used in opposition to the term *affective or non-specific 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.