We hypothesized that mothers’ negative attitudes toward their toddlers would set in motion an anticipatory social cognitive-affective cascade that influenced their parenting during immediately subsequent discipline encounters. Ninety-seven mothers of 2- to 3-year-old children completed a laboratory assessment consisting of (a) an interview/observational measure of their attitudes toward their toddlers, questionnaires tapping (b) expectancies of their children’s difficult behavior in upcoming discipline encounters and (c) anticipatory changes in their own experience of negative emotion, (d) measures of anticipatory changes in their heart rate and electrodermal activity, and (e) observations of their overreactive and lax discipline. Negative maternal attitudes were associated with lax discipline, negative expectancies, and anticipatory electrodermal reactivity. Negative expectancies were associated with anticipatory increases in mothers’ experience of negative emotion. Other than negative maternal attitudes, however, no factor in the hypothesized social cognitive-affective cascade predicted discipline. Thus, the hypothesized model was not fully supported by the data.