2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/48269We explore the role of a scalar meson exchange interaction between quarks in a semirelativistic constituent quark model where the quarks are subject to a linear confinement. We search for a variational solution and show that the gap between the N=1 band and the ground state N=0 band increases with the strength of the scalar meson exchange interaction potential. This result has good implications on the description of the low-lying baryon resonances, especially on the Roper vs. negative parity resonances ordering.6 pages, RevTex, to appear in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference on "Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum III, Jefferson Lab. (Newport News, USA), June 7-12, 1998, World Scientific (Singapore)High Energy Physics - Phenomenologytext