  Given existing empirical spectral patterns of excited hadrons it has been
suggested that chiral symmetry is approximately restored in excited hadrons at
zero temperature/density (effective symmetry restoration). If correct, this
implies that mass generation mechanisms and physics in excited hadrons is very
different as compared to the lowest states. One needs an alternative and
independent experimental information to confirm this conjecture. Using very
general chiral symmetry arguments it is shown that strict chiral restoration in
a given excited nucleon forbids its decay into the N \pi channel. Hence those
excited nucleons which are assumed from the spectroscopic patterns to be in
approximate chiral multiplets must only "weakly" decay into the N \pi channel,
(f_{N^*N\pi}/f_{NN\pi})^2 << 1. However, those baryons which have no chiral
partner must decay strongly with a decay constant comparable with f_{NN\pi}.
Decay constants can be extracted from the existing decay widths and branching
ratios. It turnes out that for all those well established excited nucleons
which can be classified into chiral doublets N_+(1440) - N_-(1535), N_+(1710) -
N_-(1650), N_+(1720) - N_-(1700), N_+(1680) - N_-(1675), N_+(2220) - N_-(2250),
N_+(?) - N_-(2190), N_+(?) - N_-(2600), the ratio is (f_{N^*N\pi}/f_{NN\pi})^2
~ 0.1 or much smaller for the high-spin states. In contrast, the only well
established excited nucleon for which the chiral partner cannot be identified
from the spectroscopic data, N(1520), has a decay constant into the N\pi
channel that is comparable with f_{NN\pi}. This gives an independent
experimental verification of the chiral symmetry restoration scenario.
