trying to highlight a select dropdown that changes when clicked on other element

trying to highlight a select dropdown that changes when clicked on other element

Hi guys,
My boss has asked me to set up a whole list of buttons beside a form that when clicked on change the value of a select dropdown list that resides in a seperate div.

I have this working ok but I also want to have jquery detect when a values has changed in the dropdown and animate a highlighted background,

I am using this effect here;
http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Effects/Highlight

And this is the page I am trying to use the jquery on;
http://www.users.on.net/~nova/nova/index9form.html

I guess in essence what I am trying to do with this effect is seperate the click event so the background of a completely seperate html element (the dropdown list) animates instead of the html list items which are being clicked on.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers
Dave