Nineteen mothers at high risk for child physical abuse and 19 matched mothers at low risk for perpetrating such abuse read 6 vignettes that depicted a child engaging in moral, conventional, and personal transgressions. Half of the vignettes contained mitigating information and half did not. Measures were obtained on nine dependent variables that consisted of evaluations of wrongness of the child's transgression, hostile/nonhostile intent, stable/unstable, global/specific, internal/external attributions, feelings of indifference, aversiveness, annoyance, and choice of disciplinary action. As hypothesized, high-risk mothers reported more negative affect (aversiveness and annoyance) toward child transgressions. High-risk mothers assessed conventional and personal transgressions as more wrong than did low-risk mothers, but the groups were similar in their evaluations of moral transgressions. High-risk mothers also selected more power-assertive disciplinary techniques than low-risk mothers. These findings support a social-information processing model of child physical abuse, which suggests that high-risk mothers compared to low-risk mothers process child-related information differently and use more power-assertive disciplinary techniques. 5 tables and 63 references