How the audience relates to a character

I discovered a new podcast recently, Draft Zero, which has taught be a lot even though I've only listened to less than 10 edisodes so far.

One of their brilliant insights is on how the audience connects with a character. If I'm understanding it correctly, here's the idea.

Suppose the screenplay has already set up a character X who the writer wants the audience to connect with emotionally. Create a situation Y, without X in the scene yet, with some emotional impact. So the audience knows Y, but not X yet, and has enough time to create their our emotional response. At this stage the audience knows more than the character X. Now, let X come across the situation Y and X reacts exactly as the audience did a moment ago. Abracadabra, the audience has connected to X emotionally.

Here's an example. We, the audience, sees a poor kitty cat stuck up in a tree. The kitty is meowing and can't get down. We feel sorry for the poor kitty. Who's going to help save it? Now X comes along and here's the kitty crying. Here too, X feels sorry for the poor kitty and helps to save it. We bond emotionally with X, as X has reacted the same way we did to to kitty's plight.

Check out the Draft Zero podcast for more. I think this discussion was in episode 5.