Cognitive behavior modification in learning is concerned with how people "learn" empowering behavior and the various psychotherapy strategies encouraging behavioral changes favoring the learning process. Although not a comprehensive list, cognitive behavior modification pertaining to learning involves: cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive learning, behaviorism and goal setting.

Psychotherapy involves assisting people to overcome their dysfunctional behaviors and emotions. Psychotherapy aims to modify negative behaviors and emotions into favorable ones. Cognitive behavior modification in learning, as it applies to psychotherapy, aspires to facilitate empowering changes in a patient’s disposition, relative to their capacity to learn. To further illustrate, psychotherapy is concerned with two modes of learning pertaining to behavior modification: (1) self-determination learning, where learning new behaviors is the result of assimilating new information through an internalized effort; and (2) behaviorist learning, or learning when it's an unconscious process, and how a person's learned responses to external forces involves avoiding pain and seeking preferable conditions.

Cognitive behavioral therapy extends the scope of psychotherapy specifically to patients exhibiting dysfunctional themes--asocial negative emotions and behaviors. Cognitive behavior modification in learning aims to redirect negative behaviors into positive ones. Identifying causes and themes making up the whole of a disempowering emotion, followed with replacing how a patient responds to those causes, is one of the objectives of cognitive behavioral therapy.

Cognitive learning related to cognitive behavior modification is concerned with how you can influence a person’s behavior through identifying her reasoning and cognitive characteristics when she processes information. For example, understanding how she rationalizes or justifies her life’s circumstance enables a therapist to design an appropriate external stimulus to facilitate certain behaviors.

Behaviorist learning recognizes a person can learn behavior specific to an external event. Psychology defines these external events as a “stimulus” following a “response” by the person exposed to those external events. Furthermore, what a person internalizes as pleasurable or unpleasurable influences a person’s learned behavior. For example, a co-worker may cultivate a derogatory attitude toward you, if he learns there isent going to be any negative consequences when doing so; as oppose to interrupting derogatory comments as they occur.

Goal setting pertaining to cognitive behavioral modification in learning aims to define activities to be accomplished in their order of importance. Every activity exerted is inherently modifying an unfavorable behavior that would otherwise manifest. For example, if a person makes a goal involving saving money, allocating time every week to provide humanitarian services to the poor on a Saturday means avoiding spending money at the local pub frequented on this day. This money-saving strategy identifies the needs specific to the goal setter. For instance, social service activities on Saturdays replacing activities manufacturing celebration modifies behaviors particular to the activities best appropriate to the environment.

An interesting article regarding goal setting strategies and self-induced behavior modification for becoming rich.

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