Five components:
Agentic/resources: as a scale for the basic ways they tend to fulfil their desires. Agentic is through taking action and relatedness is through building better bonds with others. There are 13 psych needs that fall under these two categories that further contribute to action, but those tend to fluctuate. The categories tend to be more stable.
Depth vs Breadth: as a scale of what type of skill/resource someone prefers. If they prefer lots of shallow skills or resources or a few deep skills or resources.
Independence/dependence: as a scale of what they rely on in order to fulfil their desires. Independence is relying on pathways for fulfilling their desires that are under their control and dependence is relying on pathways for fulfilling their desires that are outside their control.
Affective valence: as a scale with positive at one end and negative at the other. This is a proxy for measuring a person’s ability to fulfil their desires working on the assumption that if they’re effective at fulfiling their desires, they will experience more positive affect and if they’re poor at it, they will experience more negative affect.
Ownership/blame: as a scale of where someone focusses when their desires remain unfulfilled. Someone who takes ownership focusses on what they contributed to their situation and what they could do differently next time and blame is where they focus on what other people contributed.
These all mix up to explain most personality traits and disorders.
Borderline personality disorder is someone who scores highly on resources desire (specifically the psych need of significance), is highly dependent (on relationships to fulfil that desire), experiences high negative valence (due to their inability to get other people to make them feel significant), and blames others for that negative valence.
Narcissism is someone who scores highly on resource desire (typically significance once again), is highly dependent (on people’s praise), experiences emotional ambivalence (as some people love them and some people hate them), and can fall anywhere between ownership and blame depending on how much natural talent they have in fulfilling their desires and how much they’ve had to work on getting where they are.
Social anxiety disorder is an interesting one as someone can experience social anxiety due to a fear of being isolated or a fear of failing. If they experience a fear of isolation, then they will score highly on the resource scale and if they fear failing, it’s typically the agentic side. They’re highly dependent (the common characteristic across most personality disorders – excluding schizotypal and schizoid), experience primarily negative affect (due to their inability to get either connection or success) and can fall anywhere from ownership to blame.
That’s the basic outline. I don’t know if you could test it in bacteria, but you could test it in mice or something I’m sure.