Recent models of emotion recognition strongly rely on supervised deep learning solutions for the distinction of general emotion expressions. However, they are not reliable when recognizing online and personalized facial expressions, e.g., for person-specific affective understanding. In this paper, we present a neural model based on a conditional adversarial autoencoder to learn how to represent and edit general emotion expressions. We then propose Grow-When-Required networks as personalized affective memories to learn individualized aspects of emotional expressions. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on emotion recognition when evaluated on in-the-wild datasets. Furthermore, our experiments include ablation studies and neural visualizations in order to explain the behavior of our model.