I've never seen this behavior before... but it is possible it may have happened and I didn't notice. Scrubbing "backwards" is something that I don't really pay much attention to "odd things" because... well... backwards doesn't matter.

Honestly though, I think I would notice something like this.
This is just a wild guess. I believe it has something to do with your smart bone actions and possibly some incorrect key frame interpolations? Or some overlapping of some keys somewhere? There are so many things going on in all the actions it's hard to tell what's moving where without careful analysis.
I couldn't spend the time looking at every key frame of the actions to track down the cause, but in your "look down" action, there is one key on frame 96, the backwards scrolling appears to force that smart bone action to display the "default" position before frame 96 where the key is for that action. It seems that there may be some kind of "step" interpolation somewhere or possibly some other weirdness. It's as if scrubbing backwards causes that action to "stop working", defaulting to it's "frame 0" position.
Also I don't think this would be a cause, but there is the parent bone action rotating a head bone action. Shouldn't be a problem at all but who knows.
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Just to be sure this isn't a "bug" introduced with some recent updates, I opened one of my own files that uses a very similar type of head turn with smart bone action set up and it doesn't have any issues when scrubbing backwards. My head turn is very similar, moving bones, moving layers, points etc.
The main difference for my project is that I didn't use a second bone layer inside the body layer. I have all bone controls in the parent. I do have a head group layer inside the body but it doesn't have any bones. It could be something to do with nested bone layers.
Since this doesn't effect the final export or "forward" scrubbing it is as you said, only a nuisance... but... it could also be a sign of some other problem that hasn't shown up yet.
The trick here is to find exactly what is causing this in a really really simple file. I will try this when I get a chance.