Abstract People remember events and materials better when these are congruent with their mood at retrieval; this is known as the mood-congruent memory bias. This effect is largest when the materials are self-referential and this is known as the self-reference effect. We present two word rating studies, to create a list of self-referential valenced words that may be used as stimuli to investigate the influence of valence on cognitive processing in depressive ruminators. Words selected from the Affective Norms for English Words pool were rated by an unselected sample for self-referentiality (Study 1) and validated with ratings provided by depressive ruminators. As hypothesized, depressive ruminators rated negative words as more self-referential than an unselected sample. Using this list, valence differentiated performance between depressive ruminators and healthy controls in a working memory updating task. We thus created a list of self-referential valenced words matched on factors that influence word processing.