Emotions, as an important psychological state of learners, play a critical role in their learning processes. In-depth analysis of learners’ emotions enables teachers to provide affective support and personalized instructional interventions. Although existing studies have examined various types of emotions—such as academic and cognitive ones—from different perspectives, limited attention has been paid to the underlying psychological causes. Current research on textual emotion cause analysis has primarily focused on social media and conversational contexts, with subtasks including emotion cause extraction, emotion–cause pair extraction, and conversational emotion cause analysis. This paper provides a comprehensive review of research progress in these areas, analyzing and summarizing the strengths and limitations of different methodological approaches. The findings offer meaningful implications for guiding future research directions.