Background Overly negative appraisals of negative life events characterize depression but patterns of emotion bias associated with life events in depression are not well understood. The goal of this paper is to determine under which situations emotional responses are stronger than expected given life events and which emotions are biased. Methods Depressed (n = 16) and non‐depressed (n = 14) participants (mean age = 41.4 years) wrote about negative life events involving their own actions and inactions, and rated the current emotion elicited by those events. They also rated emotions elicited by someone else's actions and inactions. These ratings were compared with evaluations provided by a second, ‘benchmark’ group of non‐depressed individuals (n = 20) in order to assess the magnitude and direction of possible biased emotional reactions in the two groups. Results Participants with depression reported greater anger and disgust than expected in response to both actions and inactions, whereas they reported greater guilt, shame, sadness, responsibility and fear than expected in response to inactions. Relative to non‐depressed and benchmark participants, depressed participants were overly negative in the evaluation of their own life events, but not the life events of others. Conclusion A standardized method for establishing emotional bias reveals a pattern of overly negative emotion only in depressed individuals' self‐evaluations, and in particular with respect to anger and disgust, lending support to claims that major depressives' evaluations represent negative emotional bias and to clinical interventions that address this bias. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.