Memory-augmented language agents are increasingly deployed in affective applications such as emotional support, where understanding and responding to users’ latent emotional needs is critical. However, existing research often treats memory as a tool for factual retrieval, overlooking its role in shaping users’ emotional experiences. In this work, we introduce ENPMR-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating Emotional Need-aware Proactive Memory Retrieval (ENPMR), a core capability that enables agents to infer users’ latent emotional needs and proactively retrieve appropriate memories to support empathetic interaction. Grounded in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, ENPMR-Bench includes over 1,800 memory-augmented dialogues and defines structured mappings between emotional needs and supportive memory types. Experimental results demonstrate that current retrieval paradigms, including both embedding-based and LLM-driven approaches, exhibit substantial deficiencies, with empathy scores significantly lagging behind golden memory conditions. While chain-of-thought prompting improves the alignment between inferred emotional needs and retrieved memories to some extent, a notable performance gap remains. Together, these findings reveal critical limitations in current agents and outline directions for advancing personalized emotional support through need-sensitive memory retrieval.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in emotional support dialogue. However, there are two major challenges for LLM-based support systems. First, users may be hesitant to fully disclose their emotions at the outset. Second, direct probing or excessive questioning can induce discomfort or even resistance. To bridge this gap, we propose COCOON, a proactive emotional support framework that leverages principles of active listening to uncover implicit user needs. We design a multi-stage data curation pipeline and an annotation mechanism for support strategies. Based on this framework, we build COCOON-Llama3, a fine-tuned large language model, and evaluate it using both standard metrics and psychological scales. Experimental results indicate that our model more effectively elicits implicit emotional needs and delivers empathetic support compared to existing baselines, suggesting its utility for building more inclusive emotional support dialogue systems.