We discuss recent measurements of excitation of higher nucleon isobars in both pp and πp collisions, together with speculations that have been made that their excitation is due to a diffraction dissociation process. We show how this mechanism can be related to recent models ascribing such high energy direct reactions to sums of quark-quark interactions, together with suggested assignments for higher isobars in the quark model: if these assumptions are valid, including the L-excitation assignments to the isobars, the quark-quark diffraaction scattering must then include a contribution involving spin-flip. This contribution has some consequences which can be used to check these models and the L = 1 assignments to the negative parity isobars. It is also noted how such a spin-flip contribution could be involved in other processes, including one, production of the A2 meson, in which its effects may already have been observed. © 1968.