The chiral quark model with a broken U(3) flavor symmetry can be interprete
d as the effective theory of instanton-dominated nonperturbative QCD. This
naturally suggests the possibility of a negative singlet to octet coupling
ratio, which has been found, in a previous publication, to be compatible wi
th the phenomenological description of the nucleon spin-flavor structure. [
S0556-2821(99)06909-X].