  The flavor asymmetry of the unpolarized antiquark distributions in the
proton, dbar(x) - ubar(x) > 0, can qualitatively be explained either by Pauli
blocking by the valence quarks, or as an effect of the pion cloud of the
nucleon. In contrast, predictions for the polarized asymmetry Delta_ubar(x) -
Delta_dbar(x) based on rho meson contributions disagree even in sign with the
Pauli blocking picture. We show that in the meson cloud picture a large
positive Delta_ubar(x) - Delta_dbar(x) is obtained from pi-N - sigma-N
interference-type contributions, as suggested by chiral symmetry. This effect
restores the equivalence of the 'quark' and 'meson' descriptions also in the
polarized case.
