5th year of undergrad?

[ldb12d]

I'm a senior at FSU and I aspire to attend a clinical psychology graduate school within the next year or two. I have assisted with research in two different, but prestigious, labs but I have no research on my own.
I understand that majority of clinical psychology programs prefer to have students that have evidence of being able to conduct their own research. I'm seriously debating staying a 5th year instead of graduating this coming December so that I can complete an honors thesis. I plan to take the GRE this August and I have a feeling that a 5th year would help boost my chances of getting into a good school and my GPA would improve. However, it will cost a little more money for me to stick around another year to complete.
If there is anyone that has done this before, what would be the best course of action?

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[abiturient]

Doing your own project is not an absolute necessity, but would be a great plus. Does your school/lab require you to enroll in a senior thesis course to do an independent project? I understand it is probably too late to start that course and still graduate in December of this year, but what about doing an independent project without the course? That's what I did, but I know not all labs will allow you to do so. It is typical for applicants not have their senior thesis completed when you apply to graduate school in December. I was still in the middle of collecting my data at the time and didn't do the analysis until March when all my interviews were already over. I couldn't put a presentation on my CV (since it's this May), but you can describe your project in your statement and still list it on the CV. Hopefully, you have some presentations from the projects you were working on. One of the main points of doing your own study is to show that you can come up with a hypothesis and build a study to test it, which you have plenty of time to do before December (well, may be not plenty but it can be done). Say you start doing lit review now, get your IRB by the end of summer and start collecting data in September. Another option would be to see if the lab and the mentor would let you still work on the project after you graduate, sort of like a volunteer in the lab. I know people who did this, and this again is up to the professor. You can continue working on his/her project and do your own for as long as it takes (if you don't want to apply this year). So if you don't want to spend money on staying in school for a year, look into these options. May be you will only need to stay another semester and graduate Spring of 2016? On the other hand, you said that you would like to improve your GPA, and that would be a good reason to stay another year in undergrad and make sure you take all the psych classes that are desired by the programs you want to apply for. Do you mind sharing what your GPA is?
So I guess my point is that you can still get your project started and apply this year if this is your only reason for considering 5th year, but if you need to improve your GPA then may be it's worth it to take an extra year.
Do you have any clinical or volunteer experience? Have you done any internships? If not, it may be good to get that during the next year.