  Recent developments for chiral and $U(1)_A$ restorations in excited hadrons
are reviewed. We emphasize predictions of the chiral symmetry restoration
scenario for axial charges and couplings to Goldstone bosons. 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. We confront
this prediction with the $N^*N\pi$ coupling constants extracted from the decay
widths and observe a 100 % correlation of these data with the spectroscopic
parity doublet patterns. These results suggest that the lowest approximate
chiral parity doublet is the $N(1440) - N(1535)$ pair. In the meson sector we
discuss predictions of the chiral symmetry restoration for still missing states
and a signature of the higher symmetry observed in new $\bar p p$ data. We
conclude with the exactly solvable chirally symmetric and confining model that
can be considered as a generalization of the 1+1 dimensional 't Hooft model to
4 dimensions. Complete spectra of $\bar q q$ mesons demonstrate a fast chiral
restoration with increasing $J$ and a slow one with increasing $n$.
