Can Agents Relive Past Experiences? Diagnosing Event-Affect Decoupling in Affective-Episodic Retrospection

arXiv:2611.15655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As memory-augmented agents increasingly support long-term and personalized interactions, reliable recall of emotional experiences while preserving their associated affect becomes necessary. However, existing evaluations usually assess emotion accuracy and factual memory grounding separately, overlooking event-affect correspondence. In this work, we formulate Affective-Episodic Retrospection (AER) as a task that explicitly evaluates the recovery of past events, associated affects, and their correspondence, and define Event-Affect Decoupling as a failure mode where the correct emotion is recalled but associated with the wrong episode. To diagnose Event-Affect Decoupling, we propose EM-TRACE, a stage-wise framework that decomposes AER into retrieval, affect recovery, and realization. On a controlled GoEmotions-based benchmark, Emotion-only retrieval achieves 28.65% affect recovery but retrieves the target episode for only 4.44% of queries, yielding a UAR of 24.21%. Further analysis reveals that event retrieval and affect assignment introduce distinct binding failures. These findings show that reliable AER requires grounded recall of emotional experiences, where episode retrieval, affect recovery, event-affect binding, and generation quality should be evaluated jointly. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/A412/.