The Unselfish Emotions are called the Four Brahma Viharas of Compassion, Lovingkindness, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity. These are very valuable in your practice, extremely valuable. This includes doing the Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation to cultivate that emotional response of a deep lovingkind compassionate attitude towards everything; to be able to cultivate Sympathetic Joy emotions for other people who are doing good things; and to be able to cultivate the Equanimity that knows when balance is more important than going left, going right, etc. So the four Unselfish Emotions are extremely important and can be used skillfully in your growth.
Now, there are some teachers whom we have personally sat in front of, or we have read, or heard on recordings who actually state, you don't have to practice Compassion/Lovingkindness, it will come naturally later. Rosemary and I don't agree with that, don't believe it and don't see anything in the scriptures that would even indicate such a wrong view. Yet we have sat in front of very famous teachers, people far more famous than I am, who will say these words because their practice is just a narrow practice, with a degree of maybe mindfulness or awareness of the breathing, something of that nature and they don't want to touch these emotions. For what reasons, I can't tell you, but a lot of people will think you don't have to cultivate these positive emotions.
In fact, a lot of teachers will say, "No, don't do that at all because that will take you the wrong way." Now again this could be a confusion that I mentioned the other day about the fact that a lot of people think Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation is just a concentration work. But the way that we use it and the way that I believe the Buddha wants us to use it, is to open our heart. This helps us let go of all the anger, the fear, the jealousy, the whole works. Jealousy and envy: the opposite is Sympathetic Joy. Anger and hatred: the opposite is Compassion and Lovingkindness.
As long as you are still an average person who occasionally brings up the emotions of anger, hatred, jealousy, fear and everything else, then it would be far better to train the wise emotions to help balance the unwise emotions and be able to let them go. It's as simple as that. Practicing the Brahma Viharas will change selfish emotions into unselfish emotions, so that's the way we want to practice.