Feelings towards objects and situations are developed over repeated encounters with them and infered experience, or indeed inate motives, determine what one wants from them, if anything. Knowledge of what one wants from objects or situations gives guidence towards how one should interact with them. I think that to be able to develop an interest in something new or previously unexperienced, and to nurture some sort of feeling about it, gives one a sense of purpose. To want new and changing things, and to act on those wants, is to maintain an active and varied existence, the alternative being a repetative, predictable existance. Notice how current robot imlementations follow the second pattern much More closely than the first.
Kinds belong to higher kinds.
Defining the content of the World in terms of Objects, Relations and Abstractions clearly implies that an Object Oriented approach to robot design and child psycology analysis is a useful one. Making use of an Object Oriented approach in implementing some sort of emotional value to interacting with the World may also proove to be benificial. I would suggest that as a child learns about its environment, it attaches emotional ties to different objects or group of objects. A child may like looking a bright, colourful objects for example and so associates the enjoyment of looking at bright colous with Objects that share such properties. The human was not designed from scratch.