Your not asking much !!
The creature help text is often out of date by the time you read it, so your creature may well be thinking something different by the time you get round to stroking or slapping him.
.
your creature is curious......stroke will make him more so and he will learn more, slap less of both.
your creature wants to mess around with you..... stroke and your creature will pay you more attention, slap and he will do less of what he thinks you want.
your creature is (feeling) playfull....to be encouraged if you are playing ball with him in his pen or discouraged if he's kicking pigs or villagers into the sea for fun.
.
The etc in you post covers literally hundreds of different actions/situations.
A lot of people in the past have just switched off the help text and gone with "real world" training methods.
ie
You catch a dog pooing on your carpet and you punish him instantly, he learns not to poo on the carpet.
You find dog poo on the carpet and you punish him , he learns to avoid you when theres poo on the carpet.
There is a difference.
